The present invention relates to digitally represented graphics and more particularly to a method, an apparatus and a computer program product for improving the performance of generating digitally represented graphics.
Digitally represented graphics, such as computer graphics, is continuously improving in performance. In the 1980's and 1990's, display adapters for computers and game consoles appeared with graphics accelerators, offloading the Central Processing Unit (CPU) in graphics generation. Initially, the display adapters offered acceleration of 2D graphics, but eventually these also included support for accelerated 3D graphics. Modern display adapters use a processing unit named a graphics processing unit (GPU).
Due to the complexity of 3D graphics, GPUs of today use a significant amount of their processing power to perform calculations related to 3D graphics.
A continuous disadvantage with display adapters is performance. There are new applications and games requiring maintained frame rates (rendered screen images per second) with higher scene complexities, higher geometry detail, higher resolutions and higher image quality, resulting in requirements that each screen image should be rendered in a short a time as possible. In other words, it is often important to increase performance.
One known way to increase performance is to increase the processing power of the GPUs by enabling higher clock speeds, pipelining, or exploiting parallel computations. However, this often results in a higher power consumption and more generated heat. For battery-operated devices, a higher power consumption leads to a reduced battery life. Power consumption and heat are major constraint and bottlenecks for mobile devices and desktop display adapters. Moreover, there are limits to the clock speeds of each GPU.